Checking out Typinator

By Josh | Published: October 25, 2009

I know MacHeist was a lot of months ago, and I therefore could have tried it out months ago, but oh well. I’m trying it out now, and the first thing I did was search the Character Viewer for characters I might want to use, but for one reason or another wouldn’t know how to type. If you’re interested in such things, check out my sets on GitHub.

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Snow Leopard

By Josh | Published: September 2, 2009

So, Erwin posted his first impressions list, which reminded me that I’ve done one of my own from time to time, so here goes.

I didn’t do a regular upgrade, and even then I don’t really remember how long it took last time,1 so I have no idea if it installed any faster. DiskWarrior seemed to be getting lost scanning my hard drive, so I did the format, install, restore dance. The installer’s install/restore mode didn’t seem to be working either, did those two separately.2 My free-space story seems much like Erwin’s, with an additional uncertainty point thrown in for good measure — Migration Assistant copied over my old /Developer directory (with a new name), so I had two copies of the developer tools installed for a while.

All that being said, here are a few things that I’ve noticed:

Pros

  • Mail seems a lot faster.
  • All of my Dashboard widgets survived.
  • Mercifully, iPhone developers no longer have to download the entire developer tools package every time they want a new iPhone OS SDK.3

Cons

  • None of my Menu Extras survived.
  • Imagine, for a moment, that you had put Script Editor in its own Library (Window Menu → Library) under Leopard or other cats prior. You might have thought that you would now have an AppleScript Editor reference in there. You’d have been wrong. Instead, you’d now have a grayed-out, iconless reference to Script Editor.
  • My nearby PC is still just as confused when I use “`” inside the window switcher4 as it was before I upgraded my Mac to Snow Leopard.

  1. I frequently start the OS install and then go do something else while it cooks. ↩

  2. Possibly due to impatience more than anything else. ↩

  3. Admittedly, this is mentioned other prominent places, but it’s worth repeating. ↩

  4. Alt-Tab, and if you’re running Vista or newer, Windows-Tab as well. ↩

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On Google Wave…sort of…

By Josh | Published: June 6, 2009

I may have had a bit of a revelation reading this Daring Fireball post:

Facebook is a good counter-example of a conceptually complex communication system that is very popular. My pessimism/skepticism regarding Wave is probably biased by my own strong preference for conceptual simplicity; I have not and don’t intend to sign up for Facebook.

At some point I realized that I tend to log into Facebook only when someone tells me I’ve come up in a conversation there. I tend to appreciate simple solutions to complex problems. Erwin was the last person I knew that hadn’t completely given up on IM; if you can’t say it on Twitter, send an email. IM might not be that complicated, but Twitter so simple that you can’t explain its appeal to someone. Facebook is sprawling.

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Spring Cleaning

By Josh | Published: May 12, 2009

Lately I’ve been spending some time at work digging through all the crap I’ve got laying around. Here’s a conversation related to this:

Me
Do you still have this thing? (Hands over a driver CD)
Boss
Sure. (Tries to hand me the corresponding device)
Me
I’m not looking for the device, I’m trying to get rid of the CD.
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Changes

By Josh | Published: March 28, 2009

I’ve been working on a major overhaul of my weblog for the last couple of months. Among other things, this post serves to (hopefully) stave off going through this again for as long as possible.

Background

When I had the first mostly-complete draft of this post put together, I thought I had a pretty good idea what the new setup was going to look like. This doesn’t look an awful lot like that version. That being said, my list of what I want the new system to do isn’t all that different than it was when I started.

So, in no particular order, here’s what I was looking for:

  1. Markdown. Writing in HTML sucks. Sure, I still use HTML, but trying to write in it is just stupid.
  2. Markdown Extra. I put footnotes in some of my posts. The original Markdown syntax doesn’t support them.
  3. Low Maintenance. Most blogging software requires that I, as a user, pay attention to security releases and update things regularly. Historically, I haven’t been great at doing this on my site.
  4. Control. I want to be able to use my own templates, my own CSS, and have the same permalinks that I had before.
  5. Portable. I frequently play around with templates, style sheets, etc. on my staging server (Apache on my MacBook Pro) before pushing them to the real site. All things being equal, I’d like to do this with the real data, rather than made-up data or old data from the last sync.

As far as I know, none of the systems out there do everything that I want, although some come close than others. I think #2, and therefore #1, conflicts with every hosted blogging service except for Tumblr. #3 conflicts with most non-hosted blogging software. #4 is a problem with some hosted blogging services, but not others. #5 conflicts with almost everything.

Unsurprisingly, not all of the desired features above occurred to me at the beginning of this process. I had been working on a custom system, but that doesn’t really fit with #3, since I would be doing all of the maintenance. Sure, I could build a system with no internet-accessible moving parts,1 but I would still be building just about everything myself.

Contestants

I was looking mostly at hosted services — if I was going to use a traditional dynamically generated blogging package, it might as well be WordPress, which I was already using anyway. Being hosted services, they all satisfy the low maintenance requirement. Again, in no particular order:

WordPress.com
No Markdown or custom templates. While the service doesn’t let you choose your permalink style like the software does, they seem to use the correct setting by default.
Blogger
No Markdown, wrong permalinks. I think it has full customization.
TypePad
No Markdown Extra, as far as I know. I’m assuming it passes muster on permalinks, since I’m pretty sure Movable Type does as well.
Tumblr
Wrong permalinks.

Obviously, Tumblr was the leader of the hosted services. I think the only other major shortcoming was the lack of syntax highlighting. Sure, that wasn’t in my original list of requirements, but its awfully nice, and last I checked Gist hadn’t updated to a version of Pygments that does AppleScript.

In the end, I chose WordPress, with a different theme and almost an entirely different set of plugins than I started with. My new theme is a fairly simple Thematic child theme. The only custom plugin is a text formatter that I’ll probably release through the standard channels sooner or later.

The current version of WordPress does okay on the low maintenance requirement, since it can update itself and most plugins automatically. I have a lot less effort sunk into my theme than I used to, and I’m liking that. My text formatter still needs some work, but it gets the job done.

So, what did I learn in all of this? I honestly have no idea, but with any luck, I won’t forget it for a long time.

  1. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of system I was was working on for a while. ↩

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Last Night's Daily Show

By Josh | Published: March 13, 2009

If you didn’t watch last night’s daily show you really should — the interview with Jim Cramer is great.

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Stand-Up

By Josh | Published: January 19, 2009

Here’s a couple excerpts from the Stand-Up wishlist on my TiVo. Some of the stuff it finds is laughing so hard tears are running down my face funny, and some of it is just awful. Lins and I both loved this guy.

First, he explains how, exactly, we know elvis is dead:

This was his closer — its hilarious:

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DHH is getting soft in his old age…

By Josh | Published: December 24, 2008

David Heinemeier Hansson:

So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!
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The Working Man's Typeface

By Josh | Published: December 4, 2008

From Monday’s Colbert Report. You’ve got to be really secure in your audience to make a typography joke:

The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Operation Humble Kanye
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Impressions

By Josh | Published: November 26, 2008

Once I really started trying to catch up, it look less than a day. Here are a few observations I made along the way:

  • Progressive lack of sleep1 combined with jetlag does not seem to help this process. The day that it took me only a small part of was Monday.

  • I’ve got quite a few feeds that can be disposed of quickly for various reasons:

    • A couple of them are (I assume) broken, because most or all of the feed pops up as unread whenever a new item is added or (sometimes) just because it feels like it.
    • For some sources, I have to subscribe to multiple, overlapping feeds to get all the stuff I’m interested in.2
    • Some have such a low S/N ratio that I either don’t bother with them and hit _Mark All as Read_3 or I tend to skim the item titles a page at a time looking for stuff I care about rather than spacing through everything.4

  • Unsurprisingly, you notice how much material is repeated feed after feed far more when you’re reading most of a week’s items rather than a couple of hours worth.

At any rate, I’m back to my old daily process of asking myself why I’m subscribed to so many feeds that are full of crap.

  1. This has been a problem for the setup week for Caraoke’s first showing every year we’ve done it. ↩

  2. Wired is the poster child in this category. ↩

  3. Mail order sites dominate this category. ↩

  4. VersionTracker is the poster child here. ↩

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